An Examination of the Relationship Between Anxiety and Performance on Prospective and Retrospective Memory Tasks

The present study investigated the association between self-reported state anxiety, trait anxiety and performance on losely matched prospective and retrospective memory tasks and on a working memory (reading span) task. Eysenck and alvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory suggests that the deleterious effects of anxiety on cognitive task erformance are mediated by worry occupying working memory. They suggest that the adverse effects of anxiety would be ost marked when people are experiencing acute anxiety states on tasks that place high demands on working memory apacity and are treated as secondary tasks, conditions that typically occur for prospective remembering. Sixty-three ndergraduate students were allocated to high, medium and low anxiety conditions using tertile splits of ranked state nd trait anxiety scores. It was found that people with elevated levels of state anxiety performed more poorly on a rospective memory test than people with lower levels of state anxiety. No difference between these g...

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